Featuring: Cat Applebaum, Spencer Balter, Julia Boberg, Sara Lockett, Arina Medvedeva, Madison Nash, Erin Newtown, Booch O’Connell, Caroline Wong
The Fordham University Galleries December 6, 2023 – February 7, 2024 Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
Every fall, Visual Arts majors persuing their thesis projects work together in the Senior Seminar course to discuss and develop their work – and to support one another in realizing a solo or two-person exhibition in the spring. This show presents a selection of the works produced, to date, by those students.
The poetic exhibition title was conceived of by the students. It reflects both the overlap and the differences in their projects, which come together to touch on themes of loss, chance, movement, memory, the unspoken, trauma, obfuscation, and, as one student wrote in her statement, “the loud and incessant beauty of living.”
“the loud and incessant beauty of living” comes from the statement of BoochO’Connell
Featuring: Catalina Alvarez, Amie Cunat, Aseel Sawalha, Vincent Stracquadanio
Reception December 1st – 6:00pm to 8:00pm
The Fordham University Galleries Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
Fordham University and the Visual Arts Department is pleased to present Just a House, a group exhibition featuring the work of four faculty members.
How do we form feelings of beloning? Are there boundaries that describe the contour of these notions? What histories are they made from? Just a House explores ideas of displacement, familiarity, comfort, and connection through sculptural installation. Each artist uses a domestic material or motif, along with an element of suspension from the gallery’s ceiling to prompt conversation about the complicated, sometimes precarious nature of belonging.
Within Catalina Alvarez’s intimate installation, a grouping of two birch stools (by Peter Blasser), a wooden table (by Daniel Fishkin), a rocking chair, and animal skins invite a visitor to watch two chapters from her anthology film, Sound Spring (Seq. #5 & #7), projected onto a centralized plinth. Unfolding in a series of eight vignettes, Sound Spring explores the history of Yellow Springs, Ohio over hundreds of years, as narrated by its residents in comical scenes: one interviewee rollerblades and reads the village’s water meters, another stands on his head in a breakdancing freeze. The villagers describe American history—their ancestors’ settlements after slavery, a friendship with Coretta Scott King, and Ohio’s Trail of Tears— among other more personal details of village life. By interacting with their own previously recorded media, villagers uncover layers of time and storytelling.
In Days I’ve Spent, Times I’ve Tried, Vincent Stracquadanio paints sequential rows of Coliseum-like archways on a bed sheet to describe a liminal space between structured architecture and soft installation; between positive and negative space; between conscious and dream worlds. With imagery that draws from Sicilian folkloric traditions, Etruscan frescoes, and Giallo horror films, Stracquadanio frequently uses patterns, gestural abstraction, or archetypical forms to flatten or expand space. The artist generates a purposeful lack of solidity and definition –as if ghostly forms are departing and floating through a dreamlike miasma—offering expressions of grief and longing.
Central points of tension acknowledge and defy the gravity of Aseel Sawalha’s objects. Lantern contains a multitude of hand-folded, paper shapes, which are connected by a system of crocheted netting that cascades from the gallery’s ceiling. The organic entanglement of the vermillion thread contradicts the sharpness of the geometric elements it binds.Passages and Spooler are made of reformations of discarded Fordham books and other found objects (Christmas tree stand, discarded mail tubes).The artist’s work is informed by ethnographic fieldwork research with Bedouin tribes, post-war Beirut, New York City women artists and the art scene in Jordan and Palestine. Meticulously constructed, the sculptures are hybrid restructurings of found books and print matter modified by hand rolling and quilling, weaving, and paint, which mesh forms from modern and post-modern visual arts with techniques from traditional Arabic and Palestinian handicrafts.
Made from paper materials and paint, Amie Cunat’s structure –with ubiquitous siding on its façade and a hunter green interior—resembles an excerpt from a Midwestern ranch-style home. Assumptions about its locale and reference are complicated by its construction. Influenced by unnamable sentience within horror movies like the The Blob, The Thing, and Them! and false front architecture, Cunat’s object contains two Crappie gills that disrupt the logical continuity of its domestic container. Window and Gills, Tatami Tan is both alien and familiar; animal and built.
Drum roll, please—clocking in at 312 pages with over 3,000 images and approximately 87 miles of behind-the-scenes walking over nine days—the Case Study Tokyo 2023 book is complete!
Take one part working methodology from the influential 1972 book, “Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form,” combine it with the megacity of Tokyo, add Fordham University Gabelli students, stir for ten days in Japan, and what do you get? You acquire knowledge through experience with a small team, realized in a research volume focusing on branding, sensory marketing, architecture, design, photography, and urban planning.
Featuring: Lu Aubin, Alexandra Chambers, Bryson Clark, Alyssa Daughdrill, Molly Frank, Katherine Heaton, Anna Koch, Chloe McGee, Maggie McNamara, Amelia Medved, Angela Payne, Dino Romano, Slav Velkov, Schuyler Workmaster, John Zahran-Colon
The Fordham University Galleries December 9, 2022–January 31, 2023 Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
*Outside visitors must show proof of vaccination and booster to enter the school.The Fordham University Department of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the current exhibition in Fordham University’s Lipani Gallery, notes. (Highlights from the Senior Seminar: Studio Art). This exhibition brings together the fifteen artists who participated in the 2022 Senior Seminar: Lu Aubin, Alexandra Chambers, Bryson Clark, Alyssa Daughdrill, Molly Frank, Katherine Heaton, Anna Koch, Chloe McGee, Maggie McNamara, Amelia Medved, Angela Payne, Dino Romano, Slav Velkov, Schuyler Workmaster, John Zahran-Colon. The work on display represents a snapshot of their endeavors thus far and provides a glimpse into their upcoming senior thesis exhibitions beginning in March 2023.
Their chosen mediums range between architecture, film/video, graphic design, installation, painting & drawing, and photography. Accordingly, their styles and topics vary; however, their attention to craft, concept, and message is consistently deliberate and thoughtful. Please be certain to follow our talented emerging artists as they exhibit throughout the spring semester in our Ildiko Butler Gallery and the Susan Lipani Gallery.Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, co-curator, 2023
The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the third fall installment of our Online Portfolio Series with Saul Metnick’s Construction Sites.
“These photographs were made between 2009 and 2017 in New York City, on a number of different construction sites. It’s a largely visual investigation of the temporary phases the buildings we make go through on the way to becoming a finished thing. Their settled forms were fine in the end, but I always missed how they shifted from month to month.”
—Saul Metnick, 2021
Artist Bio: Saul Metnick is a Brooklyn-based photographer who once quit his day job as a producer to be a photographer. Then he quit his day job as a photographer to be a producer. He still takes pictures, teaches photography, and is raising two young children with the help of a Fuji Instax Wide.
Hot off the press—the 2021 Senior Thesis Exhibitions book by Amanda Asciutto, Catherine Cain, Ashlinn Casey, Laura Foley, Alejandra Garcia, Mack Hurstell, Bawila Idris, Jesse McBrearty, Elizabeth McLaughlin, Vittoria Orlando, Sofia Riley, Justin Schwartz, and Julia Taylor is now available. Edited by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock with a fantastic cover design by Natalie Norman-Kehe. 142 pages of amazing work by our graduating artists!
2021 Senior Thesis Exhibitions: Small Square, 7×7 in, 18×18 cm, 142 pages is available to preview and purchase here.
Highlights: Selections from the Senior Seminar in Visual Art ?>
Each fall, Fordham students working on their thesis projects in architecture, graphic design, film & video, painting & drawing, and photography come together for the Senior Seminar to share ideas, give feedback, and develop their unique vision. The semester culminates in the annual Highlights exhibition, featuring a selection of student works across all media.
This year, Amanda Asciutto contributes whimsical watercolor paintings that give traditional fairy tale narratives a feminist twist; Ashlinn Casey offers subtly moody oil paintings of interiors that are clearly lived in but devoid of inhabitants at the moment of depiction; Laura Foley presents a proposal for a sustainably built pavilion inspired by the waves of the Hudson and East River and the hills that once made up the island of Manhattan; and Alejandra Garcia puts forward brightly hued yet often ominous acrylic paintings depicting diosa, a skeletal protagonist who partially reflects Garcia’s experiences growing up as a Mexican American. Mary Hurstell’s quirky paintings of otherworldly bathroom scenes tread the line between the aversion to being seen and the desire to be known and understood; Bawila Idris’s lushly colored videos and photographic portraits navigate the prism of the body, beauty, femininity, race, and identity; and Lizzie McLaughlin’s mixed-medium abstract paintings vibrate with the energy of the psychedelic aesthetic that inspired them. Sophia Riley transforms street scenes from her native San Francisco in semi-abstract acrylic paintings in which bold planes of color teeter and collide; Justin Schwartz creates a tender portrait of his elderly grandmother by photographing the eerily empty suburban house she abruptly left after the pandemic struck; and Julia Taylor plumbs the mysteries of the nineteenth-century Spiritualism movement with multimedia collages and sculptures that suggest peculiar narratives with no clear answers.
These works offer a preview of the virtual solo student exhibitions that will be launched later this spring. To read more about the work, please visit the Fordham Art History Society’s Instagram page Art Ramblings, which is posting reviews by Lilianna Harris, Tess McNamara, Elise Beck, McKenna Meskan, Kassandra Ibrahim, Samantha White, Abigail McClain, Gillian Kwok, and Sarah Hujber.
Curated in collaboration with Casey Ruble, Associate Clinical Professor, Fordham University. For more information, email Professor Ruble.
